Portable App Development

PortableApps are great for PC install (unpack & run) and great for distribution (unpack, preconfigure & send a copy to user). In that way I miss an multiuser install option (call it half portable) that puts Data directory in %APPDATA%

Yes, I know the whole point of portability its to use only one directory, and avoid %APPDATA%. But, as sysadmin, I see PortableApps+%APPDATA% a very good and easy way to deploy software with a one-liner:

xcopy /s \\server\dir\my_preconfigured_PortableApp %PROGRAMFILES%\Portable\

Ok, well, I have a few questions to ask, and figured I'd check one of the few forums I know of that program.
First off - MinGW or Cygwin, which is better, can I use both?
also relating - I need a good guide to set either up, sure the ones on the sites are fine, but, I'd like one that tells me what I need, and what changes I need to make (I know I need to change a few environment variables or something) and WHY.

Hi all

A while back I gave Flightgear a shot, liked it and tried making a portable version.
It worked half but I couldnt redirect the APPDATA variable to the usb drive. I tried redirecting it the same way I did it with lots of other Apps but it didn't work.
I am at the end of my knowledge here and it would be cool if I would find someone willing to take a look at it and see if I made any errors of if maybe there is an other way of doing it.

How could we set up maybe the menu so that on unplug (yeah, that's right, no silly Safely Remove) the whole menu closes every single app that was running off the flash drive (I think this is one of the few high points of U3)?

I know I've tried it before, without much luck (checking every 10 seconds to see if a file exists isn't exactly good usage of memory). I'll give a prize to whomever can come up with a proof of concept :P.

I wish for FreeCommander Portable to open files using an appropriate portable software if available.

Since the specification doesn't include file types that the program opens I'm not sure how can this be done for every app easily but it can be implemented for some for now.

Hi everybody,

Lately I have made my launcher modify certain extra settings in the registry, on my XP computer. Now I`m wondering if these registry settings will be valid for Vista and/or Windows 7 as well.

If anybody could send me a copy of the following keys in Vista or Windows 7
(just the .reg file as text)

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDlg32\LastVisitedMRU

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\regfile\shell

Thanx very much!!!

Hi,
My application creates photo galleries. All galleries are linked together on a homepage. On a regular install, this is saved into My Documents\httphotos\.
In short, what is equivalent folder for PortbleApps?
Thanks

Sorry if this is covered somewhere else but i could not find it.

I am after some simple step by step instructions on how to build the portableapps menu from the source code.

I have downloaded a few different sets of source code from this site.

All i really need to know is what IDE, Compiler, Linker, Etc must be used, and if there are any additional requirements such as SDK's or Libraries.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I'm reviving BluePlanet's wonderful Virus Scanning Script to make the next generation.
As of now, I'm busy cleaning up the spaghetti code, so while that happens, I would love some feature suggestions (I'm also going to try a little forum hack, please post all your feature requests under the feature requests reply ;)).

Links:

First of all, I want to thank everybody involved making PortableApps.com possible!!!

Since I have been playing around with making my apps portable, I have had sleepless nights about replacing absolute paths!
With the `macro` ReplaceInFile` it is possible up to a certain extend. But with a couple of settings files, replace didn't work. When a file contains raw data, the settings became unusable. As well I came across some *.ini files which were in some diffrent format and made ReplaceInFile useless.